Writing to Be Read #3: The Other Jargon: Bureaucratic Writing

Blogger’s Note: This is the third installment in the Writing to Be Read” series of guest posts by Eleanor Ely, editor of EPA’s The Volunteer Monitor, which facilitates the exchange of ideas, monitoring methods, and practical advice among volunteer environmental monitoring groups across the nation. Eleanor is a noted environmental communications speaker and trainer. Click here to contact her directly.

In the previous column I talked about “shoptalk — specialized technical language, also known as jargon. “Bureaucrates” or “officialese” is another kind of language that’s sometimes called jargon. It seems unfortunate that the word “jargon” is used for both shoptalk and bureaucratese, since the two languages are almost the opposite of each other. Shoptalk is specific and succinct, whereas bureaucratic language is vague and wordy.

Orwell rewrites Ecclesiastes
It’s easy and fun to parody bureaucratic writing, which tends to convolution and pretentiousness. In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell skewered the academic version by taking a verse from Ecclesiastes and rendering it into what he called “modern English of the worst sort.”

The original:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Orwell’s version:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Environmental bureaucratese
Environmental agencies and organizations have their own brand of bureaucratic writing, with its own set of favorite words “develop, implement, identify, priority, collaboration, watershed, and so on. I’m not saying these words are “bad” per se, but they are mercilessly overworked. String a bunch of them together, sprinkle in some vague feel-good adjectives like “key” and “effective” use the passive voice, and voila — environmental bureaucratese.

Inspired by Orwell, I took a different biblical passage (with a subject matter closer to an environmental project report) and imagined how an environmental agency bureaucrat might have written it:

Innovative and effective approaches for construction of a planetary body were developed and implemented. Insufficiency of light was identified as a priority concern. Post-project monitoring documented the attainment of appropriate light levels.*

The bureaucrat’s intent is to make projects sound more impressive. But the effect is the opposite — every project report sounds the same and it’s hard for a reader to figure out what happened, or why anyone should care.

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In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good … (Genesis 1:1-5; King James Version)

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